By way of comparison, I posted another poem about a shed, "Toolbox and Shed" (written in 2015) on 15 November 2019. It is linked here.
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Like an old tramp slumped beside a rubbished path,
The disused railway shed, adump
In bushes, harried by the sea-mew’s laugh,
Endured, seeming to grieve its fate,
The hot and clanging times now past. Autumn’s
Chaste mornings, cold, pure-aired, astound
The sky in silence, flimsy blue, which tautens
When a crow caarks and wing-slaps to
The distant sun-tinged sea. Its brickwork tarred
With oil and smut, splintered by frost
And scurfed with rotted mortar; windows barred
By wire but stone-smashed; gutters hanging
Dirt-green with lichen, charred by rust; and roof
Stove in, its fractured beams like fingers
Sootily clutching sky; the shed’s a proof
That time wrecks all. Its walls are sunk
In blackened trash: old sleepers, clouts of rail,
Fouled ballast; briars clogged with bindweed
And sprawling buddleia, brown-coned and frail:
All’s summed in the tendon-tightened limbs
Of fossiled ivy, delta-splayed across
Those walls like ropes lashed upon corpses.
It’s years gone since trooping the frosty moss
The workmen bunched at dawn, then lit
A brazier, brewing tea, and fell to toil,
Clattering wagons, heating rivets,
Lifting a chassis by brawn, block and haul,
The air a stink of sweat and smoke;
And they in waistcoats, roll-armed flannel shirts
And knee-tied corduroy. At home
Their women laboured likewise – hitching skirts
For washing, cooking, back-bent in
The kitchen garden, balked by squabbling children.
Stocky and watchful, town-edge folk,
They drudged long hours, their lusts and good deeds hidden,
One slip from poverty but fierce
To jib if heavy-handed charity
Besmirched their self-reliance or
Tattled their good name.
Copse-hid, a gantry
Is lifting plate-glass facings for
Exclusive flats (with porterage) being piled
Beside the station: “London living –
A gym and pool, a terraced restaurant styled
Upon artisanal cuisine –
But coastal ambience with a frequent, fast
Connection to the capital!”
In heaven, who’s the blessed? The first are last
We’re told. Perhaps those workmen with
Their kin, who lived with little, died still young
Of fevers, lung disease, or saw
Their children cranked with rickets, all woe done
And blissed in Justice’ final state,
Were shocked to find the “quality,” buff-nailed,
Well-thicked in flesh, designer-dressed,
(Who, on completion, lived and then exhaled
In those apartments), if allowed
Admittance to the Final Land, imprest
To serve their which-way fancies like
Some chivvied chamber maid, so that bereft
Of “three per cents” and trust fund cash
They’d find too grimly what it was to work –
To rise pre-dawn and tug on boots,
Then, scarfed, to slither through the frozen murk
To lay the fires and tables at
The “House,” or stumble to the railway shed
Where, grateful, tea and baccy waited,
And then with curse and laugh to brace unfed
To ten hours labour, man and boy.
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© September 2019
